Wanda says:
"'We'll rest peaceful.'" (p. 392)
- then reflects:
"Will I, when Manse is working in an uncharted world a hundred years uptime?" (ibid.)
When Manse is a hundred years later? Wanda is not resting in 1146 when Manse is working in 1245beta - or even if he was just in 1245 but I have to add the "beta" here although that is another issue.
However, time travelers would think like this. Wanda and (Manse) Everard have both left 1137, she to 1146, he to 1245beta, so she is going to think, "While I am in 1146, he is in 1245beta."
I used to object to just two words in the beautiful opening passage of the Epilogue to The Time Machine:
"One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of Jurassic times. He may even now - if I may use the phrase - be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or beside the lonely saline seas of the Triassic Age."
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), EPILOGUE, p. 101.
I used to think, "No, you cannot use that phrase!" Now, I am less insistent - unless anyone is misled into thinking that an Oolitic reef or a Triassic sea can literally be "now." In that case, forget it.
Secondly, Wells makes us want a series about travel to all of these colorfully and exotically named periods and Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series is our nearest approach to this.
My advice to anyone reading time travel sf: first read The Time Machine, then keep it to hand for reference when reading Time Patrol etc.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Besides Wells' THE TIME MACHINE, I would recommend to new readers of time traveling stories De Camp's LEST DARKNESS FALL. Then go on to Anderson's Time Patrol stories.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
On the theme of changing history either accidentally or deliberately, the other 2 novels to read before TIME PATROL are A CONNECTICUT YANKEE and BRING THE JUBILEE.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I've read Ward Moor's BRING THE JUBILEE, but not Mark Twain's book. Moor's book was definitely about accidentally changing history (Unionists, rather than the Confederates, winning the Battle of Gettysburg).
Ad astra! Sean
Twain's book is sort of a riff on Arthurian -legends- and a deconstruction of the romanticism around them. It's very much the product of a (brilliant) mind steeped in 19th-century classical liberalism -- which at the time included anticlericalism (if you were born Catholic) and a deep suspicion of the Catholic Church as an institution if you weren't.
In Twain's time the Catholic Church was deliberately and explicitly an anti-classical-liberal institution; it was anti-individualist, refused to embrace religious toleration as a principle, etc.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I didn't talk about Twain's book because I have not read it and felt unable to comment on it.
Considering the literally ENDLESS attacks on Catholics and the Catholic Church then and now, I am not surprised if too many Catholics reacted with hostility of their own.
Ad astra! Sean
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